Clothesline controversy? Huh?

There was an article on Shelterpop last week about the controversy surrounding clotheslines in suburbia. Huh?

In what universe can this be an eyesore,

Heidi Zech Photography

but this isn't?

I fear for this country, I really do. The Shelterpop article mentioned a piece from the New York Times that dug into the matter in more detail. Apparently, 60 million people in the US live in 300,000 private communities. In most of them, hanging out laundry is forbidden. I cannot imagine ever living in one of those places, but plenty of people do. No clotheslines is but one of what are no doubt hundreds of Gladys Kravitz-isms written into the the community agreements that bind these places together.

I grew up wearing clothes that were line dried. I hang my stuff out now because I like how sun-dried laundry smells. More than how it smells, I like how it feels. There's something about stiff jeans and undies that makes me think my clothes are really clean.

When I was a kid, there was a madwoman who lived next door. She lived to terrorize us kids but she liked my mother. She liked my mother a great deal. Her reason for this unexpected affection? My mother "hung out a nice wash."

I wonder if suburbanites would get along better if they were allowed to have clotheslines. Of course, what drives all of this is that graven image, resale value. Around six percent of all residential electricity use goes to power clothes dryers. If even some small portion of that were conserved by hanging out some laundry some times, the savings could be significant.

Besides, isn't nice to be a human being from time to time?  Even in a gated community?

Well have no fear because there's a fledgling "right to dry" movement in the US. How American is this by the way? One side bans clotheslines and the opposition declares a right to a clothesline. Anyhow, this right to dry movement has spawned a documentary film called Drying for Freedom. Here's the trailer:




Well that seems a bit extreme, but no more extreme than the absurd idea that it's against the rules to have a clothesline. What do you guys think? Would your rather die than line dry? Would you man the barricades to defend your right to hang your clothes in the sun? What do you think of this clothesline controversy?

Faux no!

This is a master bath in a condominium where I'm working.

The first order of business is to tear it out of course, but before any of that happens, I'd like to pause and reflect for a bit.

I think it's one of the more egregious examples of a perfectly good art form put to waste I've ever seen. It is possible to paint trompe l'oeil murals and faux finishes in a way that isn't offensive and cheap looking but this sure ain't it. The previous owner paid someone a lot of money for that work, more than he paid for the rest of the finishes in the entire bath I'm sure.

What gets into peoples' heads I wonder. I know, I know I'm forever harping about people being free to express themselves but come on. Show some restraint already.

Sarah Jessica parker et al, please retire.

Daily Shite

Sex and the City was a pretty funny sit com on HBO once upon a time. As such it was a moment in time. A group of women running around and acting like stereotypical gay men was funny in 1999.

It's not 1999 anymore.

Ladies, you're sullying your legacy. Let's call it a day. Shall we?

This sums up the Deepwater Horizon nightmare perfectly

Of all the images I've seen of the Louisiana coastline and the Gulf so far, this image by Gerald Herbert for the Associated Press drives home the point most bluntly.

The AP misidentified this damselfly as a dragonfly, but the point remains that nothing's safe from this spill. Scrubbing your bathtub with a half a grapefruit and some salt won't do anything for fix this or alleviate it.

This spill is the result of an industry that regulates itself and the end result of 30 years of "business friendly" government policies. Encouraging investment and innovation is a good thing, but that not what "pro-business" means. What that expression means is to allow multinational corporations to run roughshod over anything that stands in their way. That's at best short-sighted and worst criminal. It's also been the de facto operating procedure of the United States since about 1981. Hearing the party that's spent the last 30 years systematically dismantling the EPA and anything that smacks of a regulation complain that the current administration isn't doing enough is a level of hypocrisy I find hard to believe. Hearing the party that stood by and let it happen trying to assert itself is almost as bad. This isn't about political parties, it's about a deeply flawed idea of governance.

This spill is bigger than BP, it's bigger than the Minerals Management Service, it's bigger than the EPA and it's bigger than the entirety of the US Federal Government. This is a catastrophe of a scale never before seen and one that will play out in the Gulf for years and decades to come. And for what?

Industries cannot regulate themselves. Repeat after me. Industries cannot regulate themselves.

Clean your tub with grapefruit and salt. Or not.

Those crazy kids at Apartment Therapy are forever touting labor-intensive and probably ineffective "green" alternatives to household cleaning supplies. The idea seems to be that if you're inconvenienced, then you're somehow saving the earth.

I am a huge proponent of sustainable practices and stewarding resources sensibly and equitably. With that said, scrubbing out your tub with a half a grapefruit and some salt is absurd.

The piece in Apartment Therapy went on to break the process down into four easy to follow steps. I have a better idea. Here are my four steps. At the end of my steps you'll have a clean shower and full tummy.

1. Peel and eat grapefruit, preferably an Indian River pink.

2. Sprinkle salt on some fresh, crusty bread. Top with high quality olive oil and be transported.

3. Spray down shower with SC Johnson's Scrubbing Bubbles.

4. Come back ten minutes later and rinse.

Done.

Many household cleaners are a gimmick, they are marketing messages in a bottle. Developed to exploit your fears and perceived inadequacies, they represent an absolute waste of resources in the sense that they waste your money and your time.

Similarly, just because it came off a tree doesn't mean something's benign.

If you read that there was 1-Dimethoxy-2, 5-trimethyl-4-hexene, Acetic acid and decyl ester in something you were about to slosh around your bathroom would you be concerned? Well, they are but four of the thousands of chemicals in a grapefruit. They're probably harmless (I say probably because no one really studies them) but why are they inherently better than Disodium Ethanoldiglycinate, Butoxydiglycol, Ethoxylated Alcohol, Quaterinary Ammonium Chlorides? Those are the four ingredients that make Scrubbing Bubbles so gosh darn effective.

Chemicals that come from a lab and chemicals that come from a tree aren't inherently good or bad. In chemistry it's all about dose and duration. Most synthetic chemicals are engineered specifically to break down into their component parts and to do so quickly. What's in them is controlled tightly and studied thoroughly. I don't know that they're safer, but at least they're known.

Whether or not you use them is entirely up to you. There are some things I won't use because they waste resources. Usually my money, often my time and a lot of times I don't use things because they waste the earth's resources or they'll have an impact I don't want them to have. I say there's a balance you have to strike and the best way to strike that balance is to arm yourself with knowledge and to make decisions based on reason and not emotion.

To that end, SC Johnson has a new website called What's Inside. What's Inside is a product-by-product list and explanation of what's in their products. It's enough to make me buy more SC Johnson products if only to demonstrate how much I applaud their move.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my neighbors the other day. He's looking for a pesticide to kill off the caterpillars that are eating his tomato plants. He's concerned about what he's going to spray and rightly so. However, he wants something "natural" because he thinks it'll be safer. I reminded him that rattlesnake venom is natural but I doubt I'd eat a tomato that had been treated with it.

What does "too taste-specific" mean?

A client came to me yesterday with a photograph very similar to this one as one of his few inspiration images. The image is from Graham and Brown, the British wallpaper people. Further, the pattern is one by Umbra for Graham and Brown. The guy didn't know where to start other than he wanted the feeling of that image interpreted and extrapolated over his entire open floor plan condominium. Perfect, this is just the kind of challenge I love. I asked him what was it about the photograph he liked so much and without hesitation, he said it was the wallpaper.

So I started talking about wallpaper and how cool it is and how my great friend Given Campbell has some patterns he ought to see. He stopped me and said, "Oh I can't use wallpaper."

I reminded him that it was wallpaper that started our conversation and it was wallpaper that was so appealing to him. He went on to explain that he can't use wallpaper in his home because it's too "taste specific." Mind you, this is a man who'd also told me he had no intention of selling any time soon and he was interested in making his house really his.

So when did making a home "taste specific" to the man who owns it become a bad thing? Isn't my whole life spent helping other people make their homes taste-specific to them?

From Awkward Family Photos

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman about a year ago, I think I wrote about it in fact. Anyhow, she wanted to know if it's OK to hang family photographs in the "public" areas of her home. I explained to her that hotels have public areas but homes don't. She looked at me as if I were speaking Russian.

I hear things like that with shocking regularity. "I can't do what I want because it's what I like and nobody else will." Or "I can't leave to personal an impression in my living room." Or "I drip a little vanilla extract on a light bulb every night, how do I keep it from leaving a stain?" How about "I want to paint my dining room a bright color but I'm worried about resale." Has everyone become a home stager all of the sudden?

I know where all of this crap's coming from. It's that great Satan HGTV. I swear, they are the Fox News of the design press. Turn it off please. And leave it off.

Your home is your home and by virtue of the fact that you're an adult, you get to do anything inside of it you want to do. Even if it's stuff I find repugnant, who cares? I'm some guy with a big mouth in Florida, not some final arbiter and neither is anyone else. So go ahead, paint your walls with chalkboard paint, put a damn chicken coop in the back yard, hang exciting wallpaper and for the love of God, stop asking for permission to put photos of your kids on the mantle.

If you're going to put your house on the market sometime down the road, deal with it then but you can't live your life for a potential buyer. And seriously, when is the last time you walked out of a house tour because someone had a perfectly painted red dining room? People walk out of house tours because the place is falling down. Gah!

Don't be a Mr. or Ms. Cellophane. Hey! That makes me want to sing some Kander and Ebb!

Life's over faster than anyone wants to admit. Leave a mark already.

An eco-narcissist speaks

My urban chicken blog post is the gift that keeps on giving. It's been busily collecting comments in the weeks since it since appeared and last night a self-proclaimed eco-narcissist named Jerry tried to take me to task, point by point. Indeed.

Jerry, it's my blog and I can write about anything I bloody well please. But clearly, Jerry thinks I'm a heartless prick. Someday Jerry, we'll have a chat about hyperbole. In the meantime though, Jerry has a lot to say and I'm afraid that Jerry's important points would be missed if they remained buried at the end of a three-week-old blog post. He seems to need an audience so I'm going to give it to him.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Jerry the eco-narcissist. His words appear intact, I have changed nothing.

-----------------------------------


Paul, I (obviously) count myself amongst those ideological eco-narcissists that advocate urban poultry, and I feel compelled to respond to your rant against birds that (unless you have forsaken eggs and chicken from the grocery store are now both passively and actively abusing. Passively by supporting the agri-business practices of commercial egg farms, and actively with your comments here.
First as has been pointed out roosters are not required for eggs, and no one I know of is advocating for roosters in an urban setting. Bringing up roosters is just silly, so let;s talk about HENS.
For starters I have a licensed flock of 5 hens from which we average 4 eggs per day. "Do we need eggs?" is now a joke when we pass them in the grocery store. And as to quality Mother Earth News (I know, eco-narcissists, right?) commissioned a study and found that pastured eggs like the ones from my back yard contain more Omega-3s and other good stuff, and less cholesterol and other bad stuff. And they do taste better. The ones from the grocery store? They taste like the grocery store. If you've ever grown a tomato and bought one in the store and tasted the difference you know what I am talking about.


Loud? Compared to a dog barking all night, I'll take some daytime clucking any day. Besides, they do sleep at night, and so do I.


Smelly? If hens, their coop or run smell bad it is from serious neglect. A modicum of effort (1 minute/day) can keep that under control. Again easier to clean up after than a dog. I NEVER have to walk around the neighborhood with a little bag of chicken poop!


KFC? You mean Kentucky Fried Cruelty? If you had any idea how THOSE chickens lived you would think twice about allowing that in your city.


Salmonella? Again you are confusing us with those nasty factory farms. The conditions of even the most casual coop are far too clean to allow salmonella or the more serious threat of e.Coli0157 to be an issue. Thank you for not mentioning bird flu. That would have been really silly!


As to you and your brother being attacked by chickens as children I will only say that if I were repeatedly outsmarted by a bunch of birds with brains the size of peas I would not be bragging about it. You had food. They wanted food. You couldn't figure that out?


As to your photo of the butchering table, I assume that is there for shock value. I am one of the few hen keepers who keeps them strictly as a source of protein. When they have lived their productive life and stop laying all of my girls will end up in the stew pot. Yes, that is a happy day. When we had Shaniqua and dumplings we celebrated the fact that she lived a good life, died a painless death, and provided for our family with her eggs, poop and her very flesh. Yes, I still eat chicken from the store too, but I won't eat battery birds because THAT is cruel.


As to my experience I've been keeping chickens in an urban, not suburban, setting for 5 years and my friends are all getting their own when and where they can. Yes there is a learning curve and mistakes were made. But I still think that keeping the farm out of the suburbs is the wrong direction. How about keeping the suburbs out of the farms? 


And really, if you are going to single out chickens (which is a funny thing to do) tell me how they are better than dogs?
My chickens don't threaten dogs, but dogs can threaten my hens (if they get in the yard)
Hen poop becomes organic fertilizer for those aforementioned tomatoes. Dog poop gets left all over the place where I step in it, it pollutes our rivers, and smells like, umm, poo.
My hens never attack anyone smarter than they are. (Nothing personal meant by that :-) I can't say that about the pit bulls around here.

--------------------------------

And there you have it, the eco-narcissist speaks. I don't know about you guys, but I'm hankering for a big 'ol bucket of KFC.

I love it when someone else makes my point

I just found this on Design Sponge and it relates perfectly to my post about urban chicken husbandry.

It might also be worthwhile to go ahead and give some thought to who might be willing to take care of your birds when you are away on vacation, or out late at night for a soiree or late-show at the theater. Chickens need care and attention just like any other domesticated animal and it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll find someone offering “chicken-sitting” services in your area. Make sure you’ve got a neighbor, or family member, or fellow chicken aficionado willing to steward your flock in your absence. Fortunately, we’ve got neighbors and friends alike willing to lock “The Ladies” up when a dinner party keeps us from getting home at sunset or a family excursion to Florida or jaunt to San Francisco takes us away for a week or two (a wide range of predators find your chickens just as alluring as you do, but for very different reasons; protect them accordingly). Find your ace in the hole and secure it in advance.

That paragraph is aimed at a very specific reader. A reader who's wildly unprepared for the kind of non-emotional decisions that have to be made when it comes to raising livestock. How's that reader going to react when he or she realizes that it's impossible to sex chicks with 100% accuracy? This person's going to order a bunch of chicks and believe it when they are labeled as females. In about three months, this reader's going to realize that 20% of her hens are roosters and they'll need to be dispatched.

It's not like they can be put up for adoption.

Urban chickens? For the love of God no.

from Flickr

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.
- Werner Herzog

I read an article on Re-Nest yesterday and it was about how to build a backyard chicken coop. Re-Nest is a website owned and operated by Apartment Therapy, an organization devoted to the propagation of inane ideas and harebrained schemes. Except of course, when they're quoting me.

Apartment Therapy and it's ideological me-too-ers seem to be driving the idea that it's somehow a good thing for urban dwellers to start raising chickens. It looks like a new form of eco-narcissism to me but I'd be willing to take a look at that if anybody else has a better idea. Whatever's driving it, it's pretty flawed for a bunch of reasons.

A hen in a quiet moment. It won't last. Poultry Ireland

For starters, you need a flock of quite a few birds to yield enough eggs to wean you from the grocery store. Even then, I'd hate to have to depend on a backyard flock exclusively. In order to keep a flock going, you'll need to keep a rooster around. Once there's a rooster around you'd better get used to eating fertilized eggs. Trust me, there are few things more surprising than cracking an egg into a cake batter only to find a bloody pulp in the middle of the yolk.

Not to mention that chickens are loud, aggressive, foul-smelling salmonella delivery devices. Why would someone want that in their life? On behalf of urban dwellers everywhere, please re-think the idea that a chicken has any place in an urban environment other than in a bucket from KFC. If you live out in the hinterlands, set yourself free. But let's keep cities chicken free zones please.

Weapons of mass destruction. Paul Midler

We had chickens when I was a kid. The very spawn of Satan they were. Hens are aggressive and roosters are downright dangerous. That's a slight exaggeration, but not really. Chickens are not pets. You can attribute as much human emotion and intelligence to them as you want to, but they will not respond to you, they will not be affectionate and they will not look at you as anything other than an irritation at best.

A rooster catches his breath between violent outbursts. Poultry Ireland.

Roosters do not crow at dawn. They start crowing before dawn and they crow all day. Very loudly. Your neighbors will hate you.

Hens form flocks and use their hive minds to plot murder and mayhem.

We had a hen house when I was a kid and my brothers and I had to feed the chickens every morning before school. They figured out that there was a ledge over the door where they could roost. It took a day or two for them to then realize that the ledge was the perfect launch pad for an aerial attack. So it went every morning. Whoever's job it was that week had to go down to the chicken coop to feed the chickens. The second that he opened the door and entered, they'd pounce --spurs first. There's nothing quite like having blood drawn by a "domestic" bird at 5:30 in the morning, let me tell you.

These hens are scheming, don't be fooled. Whoever wrote the Velociraptor in the kitchen scene from Jurrasic Park raised chickens. Gardening without Skills

Due to chickens' foul dispositions and even more foul habits, this is trend with a built in expiration date. Knowing that makes it easier to read about. But still, save yourself the trouble, the expense, the physical and emotional scars. Chickens belong on farms.

The happiest day of all when you raise chickens. Cool Creek Farm

Le Département d'Etat a volé mes souvenirs

Zut alors!

That's French for "The State Department Stole My Memories" if you need a translation.

My new passport arrived yesterday and to my horror, my old one wasn't returned. To all of you non US-ians,  our passports are valid for ten years. When our ten-year term is getting close, we fill out a form, get a new photo taken, write a check and send all of that and our old passport to the State Department. After a couple of weeks, the new one arrives. In the same envelope is the old passport, only with a couple of holes punched in the first page, making it invalid.

Getting back the old passport means that we get to hold onto our old passport stamps and visas. Getting my passport stamped is one of my life's greatest thrills and I love to thumb through my old passports and remember different places where I've been.

Well, for some ungodly reason my old passport wasn't in the envelope yesterday. I know it's not a big deal but it really bothers me. I paid a lot of money to get those passport stamps and more than that, they represent a ten-year chunk of my life that I can't get back.

My last passport was stamped for the first time in the lovely country of Grenada and got its final stamp when I flew back to the US from The Bahamas last fall. Ten years, three continents and countless miles and experiences lived in those passport stamps and now they're in the bin of a shredder in Washington. Had I known I'd never see that old passport again I would have ripped out all of its pages before it sent it back.

So fellow US-ians beware. When you turn in your old passport send it off with a fond fare thee well because you're never going to see it again.

A bas la bureaucratie! Vive les anciens passeports!

An encore appearance of "This Is a Scam"

[This ran originally in January '09 and it deserves a second airing]

I'm filing this one under "how-to," as in how to avoid being scammed. I retrieved an e-mail bearing this coupon from my spam filter on Monday and I just want to do a little public service here.

Direct Buy is a scam. Their entire business model preys on the general public's ignorance of commerce to fleece them all the more. If you agree to pay them a several thousand dollar membership fee, they will help you bypass supposedly predatory retail mark ups. But I have a dog in this race, so rather than blow a lot of hot air I'm going to turn this over to the kids at Consumer Reports. To wit:

To evaluate the pitch, we went undercover at two DirectBuy franchises in New York. Both gave us the same hard sell and offers of up to 70 percent off retail prices if we were to join. Only after an hour and a half of sales pitches and video testimonials from members did we learn the membership fee: $4,900 to $4,990 (plus tax) for three years and then $190 a year for seven more. Financing is available at 17.75 percent.

After the fee disclosure, we discovered that we had to sign up on the spot or never come back. We couldn’t bring DirectBuy’s “confidential” prices elsewhere to comparison shop, the representatives said, because this would likely anger retailers who might then retaliate against the manufacturers by refusing to sell their merchandise.

The fine print in the DirectBuy contract says you cannot return items, cancel orders, or terminate your membership. When we asked if, after plunking down $5,000, we could cancel and get a refund, a salesperson said, “You’ll have to check state law.” A review of New York state law revealed that the three-day cooling-off period for canceling contracts wouldn’t apply in this case.

Tacked onto the cost of merchandise—which you select from catalogs since DirectBuy has limited showrooms—are a 6 percent handling fee, shipping fees, and tax. Goods are typically shipped only to your local center, so you might pay additional fees to actually get your new stuff home.

All of this hoopla and added expense so that you can buy stuff at what end up being typical retail prices. Don't believe the hype. Do yourself a favor and study before you make a major purchase or better yet, train yourself to shop for value instead of price. Do all of that yes, but for the love of God, stay away from these people.

You have been warned

No snow globes. For your safety. Indeed.

How to put your clothes away. This is no joke.

photo via

On 1 February, the undergrads over at Apartment Therapy ran a piece it's taken me more than two weeks to be able to talk about. The headline read, How to put your clothes away each day. I'm not kidding.

I get it that their readership is skewed pretty young. But really? How to fold your clothes? I'm waiting for a blistering expose on people who don't separate their whites and colors conscientiously. Am I just being cranky? Do people really need this kind of advice?

I'm usually so exhausted by bedtime that the the best I can do is throw my clothes at the end of my bed or on a chair. But I've recently employed a new head game with myself that actually seems to be working.

It's simple and might sound strange — when I'm tempted to just chuck the clothes somewhere, anywhere, I just start calmly counting seconds in my head. This started as an exercise just to see how long it would actually take to just put the clothes away. I learned that it only takes about sixty seconds to hang up and fold whatever I'm wearing. But this counting practice, which I employ whenever I'm convinced that I'm too tired to put my clothes away, has turned into a successful and oddly meditative pre-bedtime ritual.

Seriously. So far, this piece has collected 40 comments. In a quickie run through of them, I saw little more than praise for the author's cleverness. How is adult behavior clever and since when is behaving in an expected, responsible way praiseworthy?

Maybe next month we'll be treated to something equally insightful like "How to wash your hands after making stinkies --every time!"

No mo snow!

photo: NY Times

Enough already. I have to get to New York tomorrow morning and this nor'easter nonsense isn't helping.

Panem et circensis

Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872

… iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81, 100 A.D.)

Happy Superbowl Sunday kids!

Papasan can you hear me?

How is this new? And how for that matter is this attractive?

By Fendi Casa as seen in Trendir.

Oh Leonardo, did you influence this table?

I was scrolling through Trendir yesterday. It's the first place I turn when I want to read the uncritical repetition of the furniture industry's press releases. I swear, these people couldn't register an opinion of their lives depended on it. Anyhow, I found this table.

I have two things to day. The first is "ouch."

The second is "Leonardo, is that you?"

In case you're wondering, that's the Abachus table by Extremis.

Is this child abuse?

Is this meant to be some kind of a punishment for misbehaving children?

Instead of threatening to bake them into pies a la Hansel and Gretel, do you threaten your kids with "Behave or I'm going to buy a Jonathan Adler Junior blue zebra carpet!"

I can only imagine how much this stuff costs. Here's an idea, if you're going to spend a lot of money on your kids furniture and accessories, why not buy something with real value instead of just freak value? Am I so wrong?

Designer's confessional: I don't like Anthropologie

I spend time shopping with clients from time to time, it's one of the services I provide. Buying decent furniture can be daunting for someone who knows what he's doing, but to someone who's never done it before it can be overwhelming. I can usually tell ahead of time what will and won't work in a given space, and I tend to know exactly where to go to find what's needed. I don't like indecision and I'll never walk into a furniture showroom with a client cold. With me, it never a matter of "Hey, let's go shopping for a sofa!"

On the contrary, I'll say something like "I know the exact sofa this room needs. Let's go look at it at Doma." When we arrive at my friend David's store (the aforementioned Doma) he's ready for us because I call him ahead of time. "Hey David," I tell him, "a client and I are coming over to look at Younger Sofas, particularly the 40530 and 40535." I don't like to waste time. I'm not a tyrant though. If my client doesn't like my preselections, I can usually tell from his or her reaction which way to go from there.

One of the rules of having me work with you on furniture is that I get to pick where we shop and what we look at. Every once in while though someone tries to pull a fast one and tries to lead the process. I say all the time that the jobs I work on aren't mine. The rooms and homes I'm working on belong to my clients, my ego doesn't figure into the process at all. Well that is a damn lie. My name and my reputation are written all over these projects and I personalize a lot of this, much more so than I probably should.

Anyhow, the client in question wanted to use an upholstered chair from that glorified flea market Anthropologie in one of my living rooms. I was mortified. Mortified. It was a chair like this one:

Appalling, it's just appalling. It stuck out like a sore thumb and coordinated with no other color or stick of furniture anywhere in her house. I talked her out of it and we went to see David and found something tailored and orderly.

 Anthropologie looks like a thrift store. But unlike a real thrift store, it has the Skinner Box feel of a corporate experiment in how to get people to spend too much money on stuff that just looks bad. Their selections seem to be geared to people too young to remember how horrible the '70s were, but their price points are beyond the means of any 20-something I've ever met. The only people who can plunk down $4000 for an ugly Anthropologie sofa are the same people who should be old enough to know better.

Yet without fail and seemingly without thinking, the design press swoons over everything in their stores. I just don't get it.

In what universe is this an attractive or tasteful light fixture? What fool would actually pay five thousand dollars for it? Why doesn't any one seem to question this stuff?

Call me old-fashioned, but if I'm going to cough up $1700 for a media cabinet,

or $1500 for an armchair,

or $3500 for a sofa, can they look new at least?

Quick! Buy a brand new indoor air polluter for just $68!

Someone sent me this yesterday along with a gushing note, "OMG! Did you see Jonathan Adler has reed diffusers now?" No, I didn't know and I suspect that I was happier not knowing than I am now.

Good Lord, in what kind of a world to people gush over a $68 bottle of stink? And no, $68 is not a typo. Further, why would anyone pay someone $68 for a bottle of stink who's previously recommended this for a girl's bedroom?

How is that even remotely attractive? I get it, he's being campy. But please, does an eight-year-old girl need to live with a middle-aged man's idea of what's clever? Does anyone really want their kids to sleep in a room that purposely ugly? If I haven't mentioned this in a while, the emperor has no clothes.

If I want a reed diffuser, why should I not buy this one from Target for $9? At $9, it's still a waste of money but it's a little more palatable than it is when it costs seven-and-a-half times as much.

This same, thoughtful soul who sent me the alert about the Adler reed diffusers takes absurd delight and sending me all sorts of helpful reminders. Most of them have to do with the hidden dangers posed to me by the mysterious "toxins" that surround me and why I need to "live green" and "detoxify" myself regularly. So lady who will remain anonymous, this one's for you.

The conventional wisdom holds that one of the "toxins" that threaten me with every breath are VOCs. Well, conventional wisdom likes to latch onto a scientific concept and then run with it to as many silly ends as are available. VOC is an acronym and it stands for volatile organic compound. Volatile means that something evaporates at room temperature. Organic means that something's carbon-based (not the meaningless label people use to charge more for groceries), and a compound is a blend of two or more chemical elements.

VOC is a generic term and it can describe anything from the scent of a rose to paint fumes. However, the US EPA has identified a subset of VOCs as health threats. A small subset of VOCs are reason for concern,  and one of those VOCs is called dipropylene glycol methyl ether or DPGME. If you ran a business and you allowed you employees to be exposed to high levels of DPGME, you would be shut down and fined so fast you wouldn't know what hit you.

Now, reed diffusers are an odd bird. How they work is that a scented oil concoction is allowed to evaporate slowly through a wicking action. A scented oil (which is a VOC) by itself is too thick to wick efficiently so it's mixed with a chemical like ethyl alcohol (another VOC) to thin it out. Once it's thinned though, it wicks too efficiently and it needs a third chemical, another VOC, to slow it down. That VOC is more often than not our old pal dipropylene glycol methyl ether, or DPGME.

So when you buy a reed diffuser, whether it's an absurdly priced one from Jonathan Adler or a cheaper one from Target, you are filling your bathroom with DPGME and it very rapidly exceeds levels deemed to be safe for occupational exposure by the EPA and OSHA. Here's OSHA's fact sheet on DPGME. Isn't it hilarious that a lot of the same people who claim to get sick from paint fumes can fill their homes with reed diffusers and scented candles and thrive?

Chemistry's your friend folks. Really.